Hermione watched the owls settle along the tables and said, almost to herself, "I should buy an owl. That way I can write to you over the holidays."
"You could also just visit. It's only a two-hour drive." Altair paused. "My home is fairly large."
A thought passed through his mind, unbidden.
My bed is big and comfortable too.
"Then it's settled," Hermione said, and nodded with the kind of satisfaction that suggested she'd already half-planned it. School had barely started.
...
Across the table, Ron had unfolded his copy of the Daily Prophet and gone quiet in a way that wasn't like him. He lowered it and looked at Harry.
"This is really terrifying."
He spread it flat so Harry could see. "First Gringotts was broken into, then Knockturn Alley was looted, and now someone's slipped into Azkaban." He sat back. "You'll see. The wizarding world isn't peaceful anymore."
Harry pulled the paper toward him and read it carefully. When he set it down, he exhaled slowly.
"The thing in that Gringotts vault. Hagrid took it out, said it was a Hogwarts secret. And after he removed it, someone broke in."
Ron was already working through a chicken leg. "Do you think it was the same group that looted Knockturn Alley?" he said, not quite clearly.
"How do you know it was a group?"
"Because Knockturn Alley is full of Dark wizards. You don't loot the whole street by yourself."
The twins leaned over from further down the bench and joined in. Hermione shifted slightly toward Altair and lowered her voice.
"You don't seem very interested in any of this."
"I don't go looking for trouble," Altair said. "I'm eleven. The Ministry isn't going to ask me to investigate anything."
He glanced at her as he said it. She'd leaned close enough that he noticed her eyes properly. They were very dark, and her features were finer than he'd given much thought to before.
Hermione caught him looking and turned her head away quickly, for no reason she could have explained.
Down the table, Ron and Harry exchanged a glance.
"I swear," Ron said quietly, "there's something going on between them."
"I think they suit each other," Harry said.
Ron made a short sound. "Obviously. Both from Muggle families. Both top students."
...
After lunch they split off. Hermione had History of Magic. Altair didn't. His section met tomorrow afternoon.
He made his way back down to the dungeons.
The Slytherin common room was not somewhere he'd grown fond of. Serpent motifs ran across everything in silver and green, and the whole space carried a heaviness that didn't shift. Beyond the windows there was no daylight, only the black water of the lake and the occasional strange shape drifting past in the dark.
His dormitory was empty. Malfoy and the others hadn't come back yet. Possibly they'd known he'd be returning.
He wasn't sorry about that.
...
Altair opened the System shop.
The quest to enter Hogwarts had paid out 100 Story Points. Not enough for something like Narsil, or one of the Silmarils, but enough for smaller things from the world of the Ring. He spent 20 points on an ancient quill.
Its property was simple. Anything written with it came out looking old, the ink settled and worn, the whole page carrying a faint trace of magic, as though it had been kept somewhere for centuries.
He took out the parchment he'd summoned earlier. It had originally belonged to some Elf and been used to log the effects of weather on plant growth. The material was already aged, already threaded through with a kind of power he couldn't name precisely.
He raised his wand and cleared the original writing, then set the quill to work with a thought.
It moved on its own. The script it produced was nothing like his handwriting. It was ancient, formal, something from another world entirely.
Recorded in Middle-earth, Third Age 3019, January 25.
On January 15, we escorted "that thing" into Moria. There, we encountered a terrifying creature of darkness — a Balrog.
Writing in Gandalf's voice, Altair described the clash in the depths, the ten days it took to bring the Balrog down, and the exhaustion that followed. Toward the end of the entry, Gandalf noted that one of the Fellowship had been wounded, and that the Balrog's fire carried a form of dark magic that ordinary spells couldn't touch. He had been forced to devise something new.
Altair left the spell beneath the journal entry. Hymn of Light. One of the advanced healing incantations of holy magic.
He couldn't cast it himself. Sauron's dark affinity made holy magic hostile territory, and the spell demanded more raw power than he could reliably produce. That didn't matter. It only needed to exist on the page.
He'd also written carefully about the Cave Troll, describing the creature that lived in Moria's tunnels. The troll was already in the Forbidden Forest. Sooner or later Hagrid would find it, and when Hagrid found something, he told Dumbledore. When that happened, the troll's existence would lend the parchment exactly the weight it needed.
The plan was straightforward enough. Let the stories from the world of the Ring spread through the wizarding world slowly, in fragments, each piece arriving with just enough grounding to be believed. That was how you solved the World Acceptance problem. Not all at once. Piece by piece, until the figures he intended to summon had a foundation to stand on.
And one day he would summon Sauron and kill him.
Given that, there was no reason not to start building the legend now.